According to a Computerworld article, BlackBerry is exploring putting itself up for sale, as the company falls into 4th place in the mobile market. IDC statistics that show Android leads the mobile market with nearly 80%, iOS has 13.2%, Windows Phone 3.7%, and BlackBerry 2.9%. Gartner analyst Bill Menezes states that even new ownership is "not going to address how the company restores itself."

One key asset BlackBerry owns is QNX, the real-time based OS it bought in 2010. QNX is microkernel based, versus the monolithic kernel used by many OS's like Linux. BlackBerry bases its tablet and phone OS's on QNX, which also remains a popular commercial OS for embedded systems.

I don't see nokia going anywhere. At this point they and MS are hugely trying to buy their way into the market with a few percent to show for it. That never bodes well for profitability and one or both of the players are taking the hit on this somewhere.

Buying your way in to the market is the only way to win. BB10 was by most accounts a reasonably good phone OS, BBRY just didn't have the financial ability to push an ecosystem.

Microsoft routinely pays developer porting costs, subsidizes marketing, partners with chip vendors (they did the legwork on optimizations for Qualcomm for example) and works very closely with the OEM to get the devices out of the door. Both HTC and Nokia have remarked that Microsoft made regular trips to help their product teams get to launch. Nokia launched a Windows Phone like 10 months after it announced its strategy.

One thing going for MS and somewhat for Nokia is that apple seems to be a slowly foundering ship. Huge install base but not keeping up with the market. By accident MS and Nokia could find themselves stumbling into 2nd place due to the vacuum that maybe seems to be forming.

I'm not so bearish on Apple yet, they're a great competitor and I think its too soon to tell whether WP will overtake them. I don't like trying to project beyond a few quarters only because its comically unreliable, but we'll see.

Apple is at a cross roads and has a very delicate line to walk, but they're a smart company.

Them being outpaced by the market is likely a function of the mature market owning less as a percentage of the volume moving forward.

I'd be interested to see an OEM by OEM breakdown of Apple vs Android and seeing where Apple loses to a single one.